I was holding maybe nine pounds of obsolete history in my hands, a literal tangle of copper and plastic that felt heavier than the sum of its parts. This wasn’t trash, not exactly. It was a drawer full of proprietary charging cables and dongles for devices that had ceased to function years ago-each one a tiny, forgotten monument to a product that was designed, from the moment of conception, to fail. I keep telling myself I should throw them away, but I don’t. It’s a strange, masochistic ritual, staring at this graveyard of consumer electronics, a physical representation of every single time I bought into the promise of permanence only to be met with the certainty of premature expiration.

I should mention, I’d just spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to organize this specific drawer. Criticize the waste, then immediately waste effort organizing the remnants of the waste. It’s a vicious, exhausting cycle, and maybe that’s the point. It wears you down, makes you apathetic. I think I even yawned mid-rant about micro-USB versus USB-C to an actual human being yesterday, because the subject itself is fundamentally boring, yet tragically defining.

The question is loaded because the market has already provided the answer: because if it lasts, you won’t buy the new version. The $979 phone I bought two years ago-which now struggles to hold a charge for 49 minutes-is fundamentally disposable. Its physical components might theoretically last a decade, but the software, the battery architecture, the charging port standard, and the sheer societal pressure to upgrade all combine to guarantee its demise within two years. We live in an era of temporal devaluation, where the countdown to zero is built into the purchase price.

This inherent disposability creates an enormous, invisible cultural toll. If everything we buy is temporary, how long until we subconsciously adopt that mindset towards everything else that requires effort to maintain? Jobs, skills, expertise, community-they all demand durability, persistence, and resistance to the easy choice of replacement. If our relationship with manufactured goods is purely transactional and fleeting, it becomes harder and harder to root ourselves in anything designed to last.

The Quiet Contradiction of Enduring Tools

I was talking to James N. about this last week. James is a court sketch artist. His entire professional existence revolves around capturing transient, fleeting moments-a look, a gesture, the tension in a witness box-before they dissolve into memory. You’d think he’d be the first adopter of every new digital drawing pad or high-speed capture device. But James relies almost exclusively on graphite, charcoal, and durable, mechanical pencil sharpeners he bought decades ago.

“They try to sell me these fancy tablets with infinite layers and predictive brushes,” he told me, rubbing the graphite stain off his thumb. “But then they stop updating the proprietary operating system after two years, and the battery dies mid-testimony. My pencil doesn’t need a firmware patch. It only needs me to sharpen it.”

“

His art, though capturing the ephemeral, relies on tools built for the enduring. The moment is fleeting, but the drawing should survive. It’s a beautiful, quiet contradiction that highlights exactly where the modern industrial complex breaks down. They want us focused on the digital speed of the moment, while ignoring the material foundation that guarantees the whole structure collapses.

Material Choice Signals Intent

Material choice is the first indicator of philosophical intent. When a manufacturer uses cheap, recycled plastic housing for crucial internal mechanisms, they are signaling the expected lifespan loud and clear. When they embed non-replaceable batteries, they are stating that the item’s value is finite, defined by the battery cycle count. The intention is not to serve the customer long-term; the intention is to recapture them quickly.

This focus on intrinsic longevity is why some brands refuse to play the game of perpetual replacement, opting instead for foundational quality materials. When you choose objects meant to withstand decades, not just seasons, you fundamentally shift your relationship with consumption. It’s an investment in stability, an ideology you can hold in your hand. This is the exact philosophy underpinning brands like EXCITÀRE STUDIOS, who build their identity on resisting the disposable narrative by using materials like 316L surgical-grade steel that are engineered for endurance, not for immediate replacement.

The Cultural Erosion of Commitment

If we accept that everything physical is meant to break or expire quickly, what happens to our capacity for patience? For repair? For commitment? The cultural damage wrought by planned obsolescence is far more insidious than the mere financial burden of replacement. It creates a deficit of stability. We lose the skill of maintenance because the cost of labor to fix something complex usually exceeds the cost of purchasing something new and simple, but guaranteed to fail again soon.

We become lazy stewards of our possessions, conditioned to believe the next version will solve the flaws of the current one, perpetually chasing a horizon of promised functionality that recedes the moment the credit card clears. I’m guilty of this, acutely. After my very serious philosophical discussion with James N., I felt so exhausted by the intellectual battle against consumption that I went home and, in a moment of utter, tired apathy, ordered a single-use gadget I saw advertised for $239. It was something designed to vacuum clean the micro-dust from keyboards, a function my compressed air can handles just fine. It was an impulse purchase driven by the weary acceptance that resistance is difficult.

It broke 49 days later. The proprietary charging port shorted out. The failure wasn’t surprising; the failure was predictable, depressing, and ultimately, proof of the success of the disposability ideology. The problem wasn’t just the $239; the problem was that it deepened my belief that lasting quality is the outlier, the exception to the rule, the lucky fluke.

Permanence as Rebellion

We need to stop seeing objects designed for permanence as quaint antiques. They are declarations of independence. The true, lasting cost of disposability isn’t the pile of dead chargers in my drawer, but the erosion of our expectation that things-and by extension, the commitments we make-should be built to endure the long, messy haul.

The Fixed Point

We are losing the capacity to value the fixed point.

If everything is engineered for the short term, then what is the maximum duration of stability we are truly allowed to expect from our own lives?